


Not Your Little Girl

by runningscissors



Category: The Queen's Gambit (TV), The Queen's Gambit - Walter Tevis
Genre: Canon - Book & TV Combination, Canon Compliant, Double Drabble, Gen, Grief/Mourning, Period-Typical Sexism, Prompt Fill
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-17
Updated: 2021-03-17
Packaged: 2021-03-26 16:20:09
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 533
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/30108687
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/runningscissors/pseuds/runningscissors
Summary: "Like a shadow, I am and am not" - Rumi--Prompt fill for HumiliatedRook's Seven Days of Drabbles Challenge.
Relationships: Beth Harmon & Alma Wheatley, Beth Harmon & Benny Watts
Comments: 2
Kudos: 11
Collections: TQG Drabble/Fanworks Prompts - Seven Days of Drabbles





	Not Your Little Girl

**Author's Note:**

  * In response to a prompt by [HumiliatedRook](https://archiveofourown.org/users/HumiliatedRook/pseuds/HumiliatedRook) in the [TQG_fanworks_prompts](https://archiveofourown.org/collections/TQG_fanworks_prompts) collection. 



> **Prompt:** shadow

**Adam’s Rib** | 298 words 

Beth has never been good at sharing, has always fiercely guarded the things she cares about: green pills stockpiled at the bottom of her little cup, her clandestine chess lessons with Mr. Shaibel, her battered copy of _Modern Chess Openings_. They were hers and hers alone. 

She doesn’t want to share her success in chess either.

Her wins, her achievements, her newly acquired titles and rankings, her unprecedented advancement in the chess world-- they are hers and no one else’s. _First female and youngest-ever Kentucky State champion, Elizabeth Harmon._

So why does his name show up every time it should be about _her_? 

United States Champion Benny Watts. Best American player since Morphy, a child prodigy when Beth was still in nappies. 

_Benny Watts_

_Benny Watts_

_Benny fuckin’ Watts_

He’s the monkey on her back, the phantom presence in the margins of her articles, his name on the tip of every journalist's tongue, desperate to make the comparison. It feels like everything she does, he’s done it first, and at a younger age. 

_The female Watts,_ a journalist calls her drolly over his notepad, as if she has no identity or worth of her own as a player, just her sex. The novelty of daring to be a girl in a man’s world. She seethes at it, her blood boiling with indignation, stacks of magazines thrown across her room to rid herself of his smug face staring from the covers, like somehow he knows he’s plaguing her even though they’ve only met once. 

“Oh, my dear,” Alma sighs, ice shaking in her tumbler of gin, shoulder braced gently on the doorframe. 

Beth will crush Benny in Las Vegas, show everyone that she is more than just _the female Watts._ She is her own person, and she will win. 

  
  


* * *

  
  
  
  


**A Shroud Has No Pockets** | 222 words 

The house is like a tomb when Beth returns from Mexico alone, with two suitcases in hand. The stain of Alma’s lipstick on a wineglass in the kitchen, her stockings hanging in the laundry room, cigarette butts littering the ashtrays, the smell of her perfume on the sofa cushions. Her mother’s presence is everywhere, and why wouldn’t it be? Alma had every intention of returning to her home-- her grandmother June’s piano, her Rose Bonheur prints. 

The air feels stale and smokey, but she doesn’t want to open a window for fear that Alma’s last lingering traces will blow out with the breeze. Then it might be like she was never here, Beth’s last chance for maternal love and family gone before it had barely begun. 

It seems stupid to mourn her, foolish to feel like there’s an ache inside Beth every time she thinks about her. In the grand scheme of things, Beth hadn’t really known Mrs. Wheatley very long. She had only been Beth’s guardian for three years.

It seems silly, weak even, to curl up at night in Alma’s bed and stretch her hand across the pillow, like when she opens her eyes, her adoptive mother will be there, cold cream on and curlers in, an open can on Pabst on the bedside table. 

There is no one there. 


End file.
